The classic 80s video game manufacturer Atari is making a comeback, and it's not just thanks to a shout-out in the big Cee-lo song. They've already got two films based on their classic games in the works-- Asteroids at Universal and Rollercoaster Tycoon with director Harald Zwart at Sony-- and now there's a third to add to the roster. According to Variety, they're bringing Missile Command over to 20th Century Fox, where they plan to adapt the game into what will inevitably be a giant movie.
As Variety points out, they don't have much of a plot to work with, just the basic scenario of defending your city from missiles that fall from the sky. The job of shoving some kind of story in there will fall to writers Burk Sharpless and Matt Sazama, for producers Peter Chernin and Dylan Clark (they're the guys behind the Rise of the Apes reboot due this summer, for what it's worth). Sharpless and Sazama were behind the Flash Gordon remake script that's been in several circles of development hell at least since 2009.
If you need a refresher on the old Missile Command game you can actually play it for free at the Atari website; apparently it's been too long since I set foot in an arcade, as I am terrible. But either way, you don't need to know much about the game to get the eventual movie-- as with so many things masquerading as movies these days, it's just going to be a vaguely familiar title, a bunch of explosions, and what the studio hopes will be a cash cow. Take your complaints to James Cameron if you don't like it.
